April 17, 2019 • 12 mins
Did Australians really wage war on a group of emus? YES. Learn all about it in today's short stuff.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and there's Jerry. Let's go. So do you
remember when we went to Australia on tour? Yes, I
do remember how fun that was. It was fun. It's
like it was just a dream. It was like a dream,
a good, good dream. Uh. When we were there, like
(00:25):
we do it um all of our live shows, we
do some Q and at the end and take questions.
And on more than one occasion and more than one city,
we had someone stand up and said, uh, something along
the lines of you should cover the emy wall, mate,
and we're like, we thought EMUs were birds, and they went,
just look it up right, So we did that and
(00:48):
here it is. Go okay, all right, let's go. So
to go, Chuck, we have to go back to the
end of World War One and a lot of Australian
veterans were returning from the war and the government said,
you know what, we want to show you guys how
happy we are with you, and just to say thanks,
We're gonna set you up with a bunch of acres
(01:10):
of farmland and you can start farming. And not only
can you start farming, if you grow wheat, we'll buy
it from you at ridiculous prices. So basically, we're setting
you up to go set up a life for yourself
as farmers here in Australia. And it sounded pretty great, right,
Like all the veterans were like, yeah, let's let's do that.
Give us some land. And that's where the first problem
(01:30):
comes in. Yeah, because they didn't have enough land. They
didn't know. I don't know if they didn't think they
would as many would take them up on it, or
if they didn't count right, but they had about uh
two hundred close to two acres of land to split
between five thousand soldiers. Um. It was doled out in order. Um.
(01:53):
Obviously the best stuff went away first and then uh,
if you're at the end of the line, you got
your land in Perth, which sound like a dig I
love Perth. I thought it was great. It was much
different than I thought. It was pretty amazing. But it's
apparently not great for farming, right, it's not great for farming.
They're also rabbit infestations. UM. I believe there's also a
(02:13):
drought in Western Australia, which is where Perth is. Um.
So all of this happens right after um, the government
agrees like to set all of their veterans up like this,
So it looks really bad that immediately there's hardships associated
with this kind of government doll dole plant right. Um.
(02:35):
Then the Great Depression ends up hitting. But as it's hitting,
there debating exactly how much they're gonna pay for this
wheat that their veterans are going to grow for them,
and it starts out really really generous. They say like
four shillings, which is right per bushel. I'm sorry, no
per piece of wheat um, which is at the time
(02:55):
that was pretty good price for a bushel of wheat,
and it was like government subsidized wheat. And then the
government said, yeah, we're not going to do that. Let's
try again, and they came up with another bill and
they said three shillings. He said, okay, that's still pretty good,
and they finally settled and in nine at four and
a half pence, And there's not many pence and a shilling,
(03:16):
so that was a pretty steep reduction between four shillings
down to four and a halfpence per per bushel. So
that's kind of like they're starting to add insult on
to injury. Now, all right, so park that to the
side and we'll tell you a little bit about the
Australian emu, which um I saw on a couple of
my little uh adventure trips. I'm sure you did as well.
(03:41):
They are um. I mean a dumb American might say
it looks like an Ostrich. That was about to say
it looks like an Ostrich. Yeah, we're dumb Americans. Let's
say this. It looks more like an Ostrich than it
looks like a cardinal. Right, way to save us, chuck. Uh.
They're you know, they're tall. They're about six six and
a half feet tall, depending they can weigh up to
a hundred pounds or more. They kind of do their
(04:04):
own thing for the most part. Uh. They get together
to breed, but they really don't like to be around
other EMUs usually except when they go off and get food.
They're they're grazers and they will graze together, but they're
all like, they're all just sort of in the same
area grazing. They're not like forming a pack or forming
a bond or anything like. Uh. They're just hungry and
(04:26):
they're big, and they like to hang out generally by
themselves unless you've got tons and tons of new wheat
fields in Western Australia. Yeah, they'll they'll eat just about anything,
but that. You know, if they have a plentiful supply
of wheat, you can attract a lot of emuse with
a lot of wheat. And so all of a sudden
there's a big old supply of wheat in Western Australia
(04:49):
because all these veterans showed up and started growing it there.
And so the emu started to come and they started
to eat this wheat. And the veterans said, whoa, whoa, whoa, emuse,
this is my wheat. I'm growing this because the government
is going to pay me for it, um and you said,
we don't care. We're gonna eat your eat anyway. And
all of a sudden, the first shot in what would
(05:10):
become the Emu War was fired by the EMUs. And
we'll come back right after this to finish this ridiculous story.
(05:32):
If you want to know then you're in luck. Just
listen to don't chuck self shore. All right. So it's
these veterans are growing wheat in Western Australia and twenty
tho EMUs seen nothing basically but a big wheat buffet
(05:54):
in front of their faces, and so they descend upon
Western Australia. The veterans are like, um, it's out of control.
I don't know if anyone's noticed, but we actually need
help government. You gave us this land, you're not paying
us well for it, and now these EMUs are eating
at all and that this is gonna be a big
(06:15):
problem for the country if Western Australia is tanked all
of a sudden economically because of these EMUs. And so
the army, under the direction of Major General P. W. Meredith,
said let's go kill a bunch of EMUs, right right,
because so like this is this is a problem that
has kind of saddled um the Western Australia veterans who
(06:37):
are growing weed out there. But it's also a really
big opportunity for the government to show just how much
they care about their veterans. They're gonna send the army
out to take care of this emu problem. And so
the government saw it is enough of a propaganda move
that they actually sent out at Fox movietone news cameraman
to film this whole thing to be used as propaganda
(07:00):
to show what the government's doing and I guess because
they assumed that most Australians would want to see twenty
thousand EMU slaughtered by machine guns. They would, so they
sent somebody to go film this, this massacre. Yeah, but
this was all under There was a deal to be
made and they said, all right, we'll do this. We'll
help you out, but you gotta pay for the ammunition veterans,
and you got to provide food and lodging for these soldiers.
(07:21):
And the veterans said what the veterans said, all right,
I guess we have no choice, so sure we'll do that. Um.
Here's the other thing about the EMU. If you get
a gun out and you start shooting at them, they're
gonna stop grazing and they are going to go berserk
right right, because remember they don't actually have much of
(07:42):
like a society or a pack or anything like that,
so they're not coordinating. It's just every EMU for itself
all of a sudden. And if you have twenty thousand
of them doing every EMU for themselves, yes, it's like
what you said, it's they go berserk. Yeah. So there, Um,
it's a big problem. You've got machine guns. These emu's
twenty thousand of them are are It's not like they're
(08:05):
all packed in a couple of wheat fields. They're spread
all over Western Australia. They're all over the place. They're running. Uh.
It's crazy town that these EMUs are running everywhere like uh,
crazy birds with their gangly legs and there. I mean,
have you ever seen an EMI run. It's pretty funny looking.
I've seen an Ostrich run. It's probably close, you know,
(08:27):
more like more the same than a Carlinal cardinal running. Uh.
And if you've got a machine gun, you're just spraying
bullets basically hoping that you're gonna hit an EMU. There's
no like take aim and fire. They're just like shooting
that direction. And the result is they're not killing many
of these things at all. No. No, I mean they
(08:49):
were surprised to find that they might as well have
been deployed to go shoot at a b problem with
machine guns for the effect it was having on the EMUs.
They were just the emails were basically indestructible, it turned out,
not because they could withstand a bullet, but because they
were just they were moving too quick and too bersik
to get hit by a bull bullet. You know, they're like,
(09:12):
I put three bullets into this thing, but it just
made them angry. It didn't even break eye contact. So
they had these machine guns are jamming. They didn't have
a lot of guns. Uh. You know, it's a problem
if they're worried about the cost of ammunition to begin with. Uh.
They stage multiple offenses over the course of about six days,
none of which were very effective, and media coverage starts
(09:36):
pouring in. It's not a very good look. Uh So
six days later they kind of bail on that stage
another attempt a few weeks later that was not much
more successful. I mean, we're talking about killing a few
hundred birds out of right, and they were apportioned ten
thousand rounds of ammunition. They used hundred rounds just to
(09:57):
kill two hundred was in EMUs. So they were pretty
surprised that that. Like, when those numbers started coming in
and the rest of Australia heard about this, it did
not look very good for the military. No, it did
not look look good. And even at the at the time,
and even in Australia at the time, it wasn't a
good look for the army to be slaughtering birds. Sure,
(10:20):
even though they had been classified as vermin at the time,
I think most people were like, what are you guys doing.
I'm glad the EMUs are winning. So people started rooting
for the EMUs. Yeah, so there's uh, it's it's pretty
much a big disaster. Um. Like I said, they had
a couple of offenses they mounted. None of them were
super successful. Uh, they eventually just stopped. Basically, the EMUs
(10:41):
won the War of the EMUs right for the for
then for for the time being, at least with the military.
After that, the farmers in Western Australia said, um, we'll
just take care of this ourselves, and so they found
that just using a UM single shot rifle was much
more effect active, so much so that within a few months,
(11:02):
something like fifty thousand EMUs had been killed in Western
Australia by gun, just not machine gun. Yeah. And you
know what really helped was in when they started to
build fences around these farms. Helped a lot. Um that.
It didn't help though, that the army had actually broken
one of the fences they while they were still shooting
(11:24):
at the EMUs. They had mounted a machine gun onto
the back of a car. Yes, and we're riding along
and I guess they ran over an EMU and it
got caught up in one of the axles so that
they couldn't steer, and they drove through somebody's fence, which
made all the papers as well, because that was a
big part of the EMU wars too que yakety sax exactly. Apparently,
(11:48):
the people in Western Australia asked for assistance from the
government again for EMUs in thirty four, forty three, and
forty eight, and each time the government and army said no, no, no,
we're not going down that road again. But the and
the email said can you guys just please leave us alone?
And the government finally said yes and protected them once more.
They were no longer vermin. So we'll say this is
(12:11):
a happy ending. I guess not if you're an email,
but sure, I got nothing else, all right. That's it.
Short stuff. Stuff you should Know is a production of
iHeart Radios How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my
heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and there's Jerry. Let's go. So do you
remember when we went to Australia on tour? Yes, I
do remember how fun that was. It was fun. It's
like it was just a dream. It was like a dream,
a good, good dream. Uh. When we were there, like
(00:25):
we do it um all of our live shows, we
do some Q and at the end and take questions.
And on more than one occasion and more than one city,
we had someone stand up and said, uh, something along
the lines of you should cover the emy wall, mate,
and we're like, we thought EMUs were birds, and they went,
just look it up right, So we did that and
(00:48):
here it is. Go okay, all right, let's go. So
to go, Chuck, we have to go back to the
end of World War One and a lot of Australian
veterans were returning from the war and the government said,
you know what, we want to show you guys how
happy we are with you, and just to say thanks,
We're gonna set you up with a bunch of acres
(01:10):
of farmland and you can start farming. And not only
can you start farming, if you grow wheat, we'll buy
it from you at ridiculous prices. So basically, we're setting
you up to go set up a life for yourself
as farmers here in Australia. And it sounded pretty great, right,
Like all the veterans were like, yeah, let's let's do that.
Give us some land. And that's where the first problem
(01:30):
comes in. Yeah, because they didn't have enough land. They
didn't know. I don't know if they didn't think they
would as many would take them up on it, or
if they didn't count right, but they had about uh
two hundred close to two acres of land to split
between five thousand soldiers. Um. It was doled out in order. Um.
(01:53):
Obviously the best stuff went away first and then uh,
if you're at the end of the line, you got
your land in Perth, which sound like a dig I
love Perth. I thought it was great. It was much
different than I thought. It was pretty amazing. But it's
apparently not great for farming, right, it's not great for farming.
They're also rabbit infestations. UM. I believe there's also a
(02:13):
drought in Western Australia, which is where Perth is. Um.
So all of this happens right after um, the government
agrees like to set all of their veterans up like this,
So it looks really bad that immediately there's hardships associated
with this kind of government doll dole plant right. Um.
(02:35):
Then the Great Depression ends up hitting. But as it's hitting,
there debating exactly how much they're gonna pay for this
wheat that their veterans are going to grow for them,
and it starts out really really generous. They say like
four shillings, which is right per bushel. I'm sorry, no
per piece of wheat um, which is at the time
(02:55):
that was pretty good price for a bushel of wheat,
and it was like government subsidized wheat. And then the
government said, yeah, we're not going to do that. Let's
try again, and they came up with another bill and
they said three shillings. He said, okay, that's still pretty good,
and they finally settled and in nine at four and
a half pence, And there's not many pence and a shilling,
(03:16):
so that was a pretty steep reduction between four shillings
down to four and a halfpence per per bushel. So
that's kind of like they're starting to add insult on
to injury. Now, all right, so park that to the
side and we'll tell you a little bit about the
Australian emu, which um I saw on a couple of
my little uh adventure trips. I'm sure you did as well.
(03:41):
They are um. I mean a dumb American might say
it looks like an Ostrich. That was about to say
it looks like an Ostrich. Yeah, we're dumb Americans. Let's
say this. It looks more like an Ostrich than it
looks like a cardinal. Right, way to save us, chuck. Uh.
They're you know, they're tall. They're about six six and
a half feet tall, depending they can weigh up to
a hundred pounds or more. They kind of do their
(04:04):
own thing for the most part. Uh. They get together
to breed, but they really don't like to be around
other EMUs usually except when they go off and get food.
They're they're grazers and they will graze together, but they're
all like, they're all just sort of in the same
area grazing. They're not like forming a pack or forming
a bond or anything like. Uh. They're just hungry and
(04:26):
they're big, and they like to hang out generally by
themselves unless you've got tons and tons of new wheat
fields in Western Australia. Yeah, they'll they'll eat just about anything,
but that. You know, if they have a plentiful supply
of wheat, you can attract a lot of emuse with
a lot of wheat. And so all of a sudden
there's a big old supply of wheat in Western Australia
(04:49):
because all these veterans showed up and started growing it there.
And so the emu started to come and they started
to eat this wheat. And the veterans said, whoa, whoa, whoa, emuse,
this is my wheat. I'm growing this because the government
is going to pay me for it, um and you said,
we don't care. We're gonna eat your eat anyway. And
all of a sudden, the first shot in what would
(05:10):
become the Emu War was fired by the EMUs. And
we'll come back right after this to finish this ridiculous story.
(05:32):
If you want to know then you're in luck. Just
listen to don't chuck self shore. All right. So it's
these veterans are growing wheat in Western Australia and twenty
tho EMUs seen nothing basically but a big wheat buffet
(05:54):
in front of their faces, and so they descend upon
Western Australia. The veterans are like, um, it's out of control.
I don't know if anyone's noticed, but we actually need
help government. You gave us this land, you're not paying
us well for it, and now these EMUs are eating
at all and that this is gonna be a big
(06:15):
problem for the country if Western Australia is tanked all
of a sudden economically because of these EMUs. And so
the army, under the direction of Major General P. W. Meredith,
said let's go kill a bunch of EMUs, right right,
because so like this is this is a problem that
has kind of saddled um the Western Australia veterans who
(06:37):
are growing weed out there. But it's also a really
big opportunity for the government to show just how much
they care about their veterans. They're gonna send the army
out to take care of this emu problem. And so
the government saw it is enough of a propaganda move
that they actually sent out at Fox movietone news cameraman
to film this whole thing to be used as propaganda
(07:00):
to show what the government's doing and I guess because
they assumed that most Australians would want to see twenty
thousand EMU slaughtered by machine guns. They would, so they
sent somebody to go film this, this massacre. Yeah, but
this was all under There was a deal to be
made and they said, all right, we'll do this. We'll
help you out, but you gotta pay for the ammunition veterans,
and you got to provide food and lodging for these soldiers.
(07:21):
And the veterans said what the veterans said, all right,
I guess we have no choice, so sure we'll do that. Um.
Here's the other thing about the EMU. If you get
a gun out and you start shooting at them, they're
gonna stop grazing and they are going to go berserk
right right, because remember they don't actually have much of
(07:42):
like a society or a pack or anything like that,
so they're not coordinating. It's just every EMU for itself
all of a sudden. And if you have twenty thousand
of them doing every EMU for themselves, yes, it's like
what you said, it's they go berserk. Yeah. So there, Um,
it's a big problem. You've got machine guns. These emu's
twenty thousand of them are are It's not like they're
(08:05):
all packed in a couple of wheat fields. They're spread
all over Western Australia. They're all over the place. They're running. Uh.
It's crazy town that these EMUs are running everywhere like uh,
crazy birds with their gangly legs and there. I mean,
have you ever seen an EMI run. It's pretty funny looking.
I've seen an Ostrich run. It's probably close, you know,
(08:27):
more like more the same than a Carlinal cardinal running. Uh.
And if you've got a machine gun, you're just spraying
bullets basically hoping that you're gonna hit an EMU. There's
no like take aim and fire. They're just like shooting
that direction. And the result is they're not killing many
of these things at all. No. No, I mean they
(08:49):
were surprised to find that they might as well have
been deployed to go shoot at a b problem with
machine guns for the effect it was having on the EMUs.
They were just the emails were basically indestructible, it turned out,
not because they could withstand a bullet, but because they
were just they were moving too quick and too bersik
to get hit by a bull bullet. You know, they're like,
(09:12):
I put three bullets into this thing, but it just
made them angry. It didn't even break eye contact. So
they had these machine guns are jamming. They didn't have
a lot of guns. Uh. You know, it's a problem
if they're worried about the cost of ammunition to begin with. Uh.
They stage multiple offenses over the course of about six days,
none of which were very effective, and media coverage starts
(09:36):
pouring in. It's not a very good look. Uh So
six days later they kind of bail on that stage
another attempt a few weeks later that was not much
more successful. I mean, we're talking about killing a few
hundred birds out of right, and they were apportioned ten
thousand rounds of ammunition. They used hundred rounds just to
(09:57):
kill two hundred was in EMUs. So they were pretty
surprised that that. Like, when those numbers started coming in
and the rest of Australia heard about this, it did
not look very good for the military. No, it did
not look look good. And even at the at the time,
and even in Australia at the time, it wasn't a
good look for the army to be slaughtering birds. Sure,
(10:20):
even though they had been classified as vermin at the time,
I think most people were like, what are you guys doing.
I'm glad the EMUs are winning. So people started rooting
for the EMUs. Yeah, so there's uh, it's it's pretty
much a big disaster. Um. Like I said, they had
a couple of offenses they mounted. None of them were
super successful. Uh, they eventually just stopped. Basically, the EMUs
(10:41):
won the War of the EMUs right for the for
then for for the time being, at least with the military.
After that, the farmers in Western Australia said, um, we'll
just take care of this ourselves, and so they found
that just using a UM single shot rifle was much
more effect active, so much so that within a few months,
(11:02):
something like fifty thousand EMUs had been killed in Western
Australia by gun, just not machine gun. Yeah. And you
know what really helped was in when they started to
build fences around these farms. Helped a lot. Um that.
It didn't help though, that the army had actually broken
one of the fences they while they were still shooting
(11:24):
at the EMUs. They had mounted a machine gun onto
the back of a car. Yes, and we're riding along
and I guess they ran over an EMU and it
got caught up in one of the axles so that
they couldn't steer, and they drove through somebody's fence, which
made all the papers as well, because that was a
big part of the EMU wars too que yakety sax exactly. Apparently,
(11:48):
the people in Western Australia asked for assistance from the
government again for EMUs in thirty four, forty three, and
forty eight, and each time the government and army said no, no, no,
we're not going down that road again. But the and
the email said can you guys just please leave us alone?
And the government finally said yes and protected them once more.
They were no longer vermin. So we'll say this is
(12:11):
a happy ending. I guess not if you're an email,
but sure, I got nothing else, all right. That's it.
Short stuff. Stuff you should Know is a production of
iHeart Radios How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my
heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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